Gouffre Porte-de-Larrau

Hel squatted on the flat slab that edged their base camp beside the rubble cone, his helmet light turned off to save the batteries, listening over the field telephone to Le Cagot’s stream of babble, invective, and song as he descended on the cable, constantly bullying and amusing the Basque lads operating the pedal winch above. Le Cagot was taking a breather, braced up in the bottom of the corkscrew before allowing himself to be lowered into the void of Le Cagot’s Cave, down into the waterfall, where he would have to hang, twisting on the line, while the lads locked up and replaced the cable drum.

After ordering them to be quick about the job and not leave him hanging there, dangling like Christ on the tree, or he would come back up and do them exquisite bodily damage, he said, “All right, Niko, I’m coming down!”

“That’s the only way gravity works,” Hel commented, as he looked up for the first glimpse of Le Cagot’s helmet light emerging through the mist of the waterfall.

A few meters below the opening into the principal cave, the descent stopped, and the Basque boy on the phones announced that they were changing drums.

“Get on with it!” Le Cagot ordered. “This cold shower is abusing my manhood!”

Hel was considering the task of carrying the heavy air tank all the way to the Wine Cellar at the end of the system, glad that he could rely on Le Cagot’s bull strength, when a muffled shout came over the earphones. Then a sharp report. His first reaction was that something had snapped. A cable? The tripod? His body instinctively tightened in kinesthetic sympathy for Le Cagot. There were two more crisp reports. Gunfire!

Then silence.

Hel could see Le Cagot’s helmet lamp, blurred through the mist of the waterfall, winking on and off as he turned slowly on the end of the cable.

“What in hell is going on?” Le Cagot asked over the phones.

“I don’t know.”

A voice came over the telephone, thin and distant “I warned you to stay out of this, Mr. Hel.”

“Diamond?” Hel asked, unnecessarily.

“That is correct. The merchant. The one who would not dare meet you face to face.”

“You call this face to face?”

“It’s close enough.”

Le Cagot’s voice was tight with the strain on his chest and diaphragm from hanging in the harness. “What is going on?”

“Diamond?” Hel was forcing himself to remain calm. “What happened to the boys at the winch?”

“They’re dead.”

“I see. Listen. It’s me you want, and I’m at the bottom of the shaft. I’m not the one hanging from the cable. It is my friend. I can instruct you how to lower him.”

“Why on earth should I do that?”

From the background, Hel heard Darryl Starr’s voice. “That’s the son of a bitch that took my piece. Let him hang there, turning slowly in the wind, the mammy-jammer!”

There was the sound of a childish giggle—the PLO scab they called Haman.

“What makes you think I involved myself in your business?” Hel asked, his voice conversational, although he was frantically playing for time to think.

“The Mother Company keeps sources close to our friends in England—just to confirm their allegiance. I believe you met our Miss Biffen, the young model?”

“If I get out of here, Diamond…”

“Save your breath, Hel. I happen to know that is a ‘bottomless pit from which there is no exit.’”

Hel took a slow breath. Those were Le Cagot’s words in the widow’s bar that afternoon.

“I warned you,” Diamond continued, “that we would have to take counteraction of a kind that would satisfy the vicious tastes of our Arab friends. You will be a while dying, and that will please them. And I have arranged a more visible monument to your punishment. That château of yours? It ceased to exist an hour and a half ago.”

“Diamond…” Hel had nothing to say, but he wanted to keep Diamond on the other end of the line. “Le Cagot is nothing to you. Why let him hang there?”

“It’s a detail sure to amuse our Arab friends.”

“Listen, Diamond—there are men coming to relieve those lads. They’ll find us and get us out.”

“That isn’t true. In fact, it’s a disappointingly pallid lie. But to forestall the possibility of someone stumbling upon this place accidentally, I intend to send men up to bury your Basque friends here, dismantle all this bric-abrac, and roll boulders into the pit to conceal the entrance. I tell you this as an act of kindness—so you won’t waste yourself on fruitless hope.”

Hel did not respond.

“Do you remember what my brother looked like, Hel?”

“Vaguely.”

“Good. Keep him in mind.”

There was a rattling over the headphones, as they were taken off and tossed aside.

“Diamond? Diamond?” Hel squeezed the phone line in his fingers. The only sound over the phone was Le Cagot’s labored breathing.

Hel turned on his helmet light and the ten-watt bulb connected to battery, so Le Cagot could see something below him and not feel deserted.

“Well, what about that old friend?” Le Cagot’s half-strangled voice came over the line. “Not exactly the denouement I would have chosen for this colorful character I have created for myself.”

For a desperate moment, Hel considered attempting to scale the walls of the cave, maybe get above Le Cagot and let a line down to him.

Impossible. It would take hours of work with drill and expansion bolts to move up that featureless, overhanging face; and long before that, Le Cagot would be dead, strangled in the harness webbing that was even now crushing the breath out of him.

Could Le Cagot get out of this harness and up the cable to the mouth of the corkscrew? From there it was barely conceivable that he might work his way up to the surface by free climbing.

He suggested this to Beñat over the phone.

Le Cagot’s voice was a weak rasp. “Can’t… ribs… weight of… water…”

“Beñat!”

“What, for the love of God?”

A last slim possibility had occurred to Hel. The telephone line. It wasn’t tied off firmly, and the chances that it would take a man’s weight were slight; but it was just possible that it had fouled somewhere above, perhaps tangled with the descent cable.

“Beñat? Can you get onto the phone line? Can you cut yourself out of your harness?”

Le Cagot hadn’t breath enough left to answer, but from the vibration in the phone line, Hel knew he was trying to follow instructions. A minute passed. Two. The mist-blurred helmet lamp was dancing jerkily up near the roof of the cave. Le Cagot was clinging to the phone line, using his last strength before unconsciousness to hack away at the web straps of his harness with his knife.

He gripped the wet phone line with all his force and sawed through the last strap. His weight jerked onto the phone line… snatching it loose.

“Christ!” he cried.

His helmet light rushed down toward Hel. For a fraction of a second, the coiling phone line puddled at Hel’s feet. With a fleshy slap, Le Cagot’s body hit the tip of the rubble cone, bounced, tumbled in a clatter of rock and debris, then lodged head-downward not ten meters from Hel.

“Beñat!”

Hel rushed to him. He wasn’t dead. The chest was crushed; it convulsed in heaving gasps that spewed bloody foam from the mouth. The helmet had taken the initial impact but had come off during the bouncing down the rubble. He was bleeding from his nose and ears. Hanging head down, he was choking on his own blood.

As gently as possible, Hel lifted Le Cagot’s torso in his arms and settled it more comfortably. The damage he might do by moving him did not matter; the man was dying. Indeed, Hel resented the powerful Basque constitution that denied his friend immediate release into death.

Le Cagot’s breath was rapid and shallow; his open eyes were slowly dilating. He coughed, and the motion brought him racking pain.